Michael Hiltzik: The truth about the Harvard president's ouster

You may have heard during the last few days about the resignation by the president of a smallish university in New England.

Pundits, politicians and alumni are currently locked in a debate over whether Claudine Gay's decision to step down after only a months-long tenure as president of Harvard was due to accusations that she was a serial plagiarist or her maladroit performance last month at a congressional hearing about a surge of antisemitism on American college campuses.

A few things about this: That some of Gay's academic writings crossed the line into plagiarism is indisputable. That she, along with the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, failed to knock the "gotcha" questions about antisemitism back down the throats of the cynical, preening Republican interrogators at the hearing is also indisputable.

What's important is that neither of those facts has anything to do with what was really behind the campaign to force Gay out of her job. To put it simply, the press has completely missed the real story. To be precise, the debate about her resignation has ignored the noxious context,